Florence Beatrice Price was born in Little Rock, Arkansas, on April 9, 1887, and died in Chicago, Illinois, on June 3, 1953. The Colonial Dance is scored for piccolo, two flutes, two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons, four horns, two trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion (two players), and strings. Approximate performance time is six minutes.

Born in Little Rock, Arkansas, Florence Beatrice Price studied at Boston’s New England Conservatory, where she earned an artist’s degree in organ, and a teacher’s diploma in piano. After graduation, Price taught music at various institutions in Little Rock and Atlanta. In 1927, Florence Beatrice Price moved to Chicago. There, Price earned recognition for her talents as a composer and concert pianist. In 1933, Frederick Stock and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra performed Price’s Symphony in E minor. This was the first time a major American orchestra had performed an orchestral work by a female African American composer. Numerous performances of Price’s music, both in the United States and abroad, soon followed.

For years, Florence Price was best known for her art songs and arrangements of spirituals, performed by such artists as Marian Anderson and Leontyne Price. But Price’s more than 300 compositions span a wide variety of instrumental and vocal genres. After Price’s death in 1953, her daughter, Florence Price Robinson, took possession of her mother’s scores, most of them unpublished. When Robinson died in 1975, it seemed that the scores were lost. But in 2009, they were uncovered in an abandoned house by property renovators. The University of Arkansas at Fayetteville acquired the scores, and eventually made them available to the public. In recent years, Price’s concert music has become a regular and welcome part of the repertoire.

Like Czech composer Antonín Dvořák (see, “New World” Symphony, below), Florence Price’s music often features a masterful fusion of classical and folk elements. That is certainly the case in Price’s work for orchestra, Colonial Dance (composition date unknown). And the kinship between Price’s exuberant composition and Dvořák’s Slavonic Dance Opus 46, No. 1 (1878) is unmistakable.